Friday, October 30, 2009

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala yesterday here at work. I think it took about 6 hours. Most of that was probably due to being throttled here and how busy the download site was. I didn't mind.

I like the new login screen but I don't really see too many differences.

When I got home, I decided to try and get the wireless working again. I went to System/Administration/Hardware Drivers and it listed a couple of wireless drivers. I installed one of them and poof - it worked. I was able to login to my router and surf the web.

I then decided to try and get the speaker/headphones problem fixed. Sound comes out of both. I found an Ubuntu wiki page for this model of laptop and started looking around for a solution. One solution was to install Alsamixeguri. I installed it and poof - it worked. Sort of. Now sound never comes out of the speakers. But that is fine with me.

So right now I'm listening to The Doors from my 16g usb drive using VLC.

My next problem to fix is to figure out how to keep from having to change the resolv.conf file so I can get to the firewall here at work. I have to change it every day.

I played around with adding/removing stuff from the panel. Now I have launch buttons for Chrome and TweetDeck.

I installed NetBeans the other day so I played around with the BigDecimal code that JDL emailed to the jug.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

My work laptop died last week and PC Support gave me another one just like it. They also left my old pc. I decided that since this laptop was 'dead', I'd see if I could install Ubuntu on it.

The machine would try to boot into Windows but would hang. I guess it was a corrupt file system problem.

So I installed Ubuntu from a cd and it's been working fine, so far.

I really like the Add/Remove Programs app. I can pick from lots of apps. Installing apps that aren't listed, like TweetDeck and Chrome, are a little more work. I'm pretty sure I can add an entry somewhere to have the app look for apps in other places. I'll have to check on that.

Installing NetBeans & Java 1.6 was a breeze thanks to Sun.

I installed a media player called VLC (recommended by @codeless). It seems to work well.

I have to edit the etc/resolv.conf file everytime I reboot so that I can get to the internet. I haven't looked into why.

Another issue I have is that sound comes thru both the speakers and headphones. I found lots of others with the same issue. One solution looked like it was patching the kernel. I don't think I'll do that. I'm sure the problem is a hardware driver kind of thing.

Since I don't really know much about routers and connecting to networks, I haven't been able to get the machine to talk to my wireless router at home. I think part of the problem is a hardware driver.